Tag: internet

Countries Call on the EU to Enforce “Values” Through Speech Rules

European governments are intensifying pressure on Brussels to tighten control over which organizations receive EU funding, using the language of “combating hate” to justify measures that could sharply restrict free expression.

France, Austria, and the Netherlands have jointly circulated a paper calling on the European Commission to withdraw financial support from any group that does not conform to “European values.”

The document, seen by Politico, urges member states to “redouble their efforts to combat racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim hatred” and to ensure “no support is given to entities hostile to European values, in particular through funding.”

Behind the rhetoric of tolerance, the plan lays out a system that ties access to EU money directly to ideological loyalty.

Under the proposal, beneficiaries of programs such as Erasmus+ and CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) would be required to sign pledges confirming that they “respect and promote EU rights and values.”

The Commission would also be instructed to apply existing budget rules that allow for excluding groups accused of “inciting hatred.”

The initiative arrives just ahead of a European Council meeting in Brussels, where leaders are set to discuss a range of topics, including Ukraine, migration, defense, and Europe’s digital and environmental goals.

A draft of the Council’s conclusions adds another layer by insisting that “EU values apply equally in the digital sphere,” with the “protection of minors” highlighted as a key aim.

What looks like a defense of European ideals increasingly resembles an effort to police opinions.

By expanding the concept of hate speech both online and offline, the document could allow EU institutions to label controversial or dissenting views as violations of European values. This would effectively hand Brussels the power to determine which voices are acceptable in public debate.

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DUDE BREAKING: Robby Starbuck is suing Google over INSANE attacks against him by Google’s evil AI

Google’s AI has been targeting Robby Starbuck in an insane way with completely fake attacks on him, which Starbuck says their AI worked overtime to make believable with links to fake articles and fake official records.

He’s warned them to cease and desist and now he’s suing them.

He explains it all below:

HUGE NEWS: I’m suing @Google today.

What you’re about to see is insane.

Since 2023, @GoogleAI (Bard, Gemini & Gemma), has been defaming me with fake criminal allegations including sexual assault, child rape, abuse, fraud, stalking, drug charges, and even saying I was in Epstein’s flight logs.

All 100% fake. All generated by Google’s AI. I have ZERO criminal record or allegations.

So why did Google do it? Google’s AI says that I was targeted because of my political views.

Even worse — Google execs KNEW for 2 YEARS that this was happening because I told them and my lawyers sent cease and desist letters multiple times.

This morning, my team @dhillonlaw filed my lawsuit against Google and now I’m going public with all the receipts — because this can’t ever happen to anyone else.

Google’s AI didn’t just lie — it built fake worlds to make its lies look real:

• Fake victims
• Fake therapy records
• Fake court records
• Fake police records
• Fake relationships
• Fake “news” stories

It even fabricated statements denouncing me from President Trump, @elonmusk and @JDVance over sexual assaults that Google completely invented.

One of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen is how dedicated their AI was to doubling down on the lies. Google’s AI routinely cited fake sources by creating fake links to REAL media outlets and shows, complete with fake headlines so readers would trust the information. It would continue to do this even if you called the AI out for lying or sending fake links. In short, it was creating fake legacy media reports as a way to launder trust with users so they would believe elaborate lies that it told.

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‘I am melting, help me’: The 30-year-old drug website that transformed psychedelic research

Thirty years ago, drug users flocked to a website called Erowid to describe experiences on everything from Advil to LSD. Today it’s become a goldmine for researchers and governments.

“I am melting, help me.” This is not only an unusual plea for assistance. It’s also the title of a “trip report”: one person’s experience with the powerful dissociative drug phencyclidine (known as PCP). And it’s just one of many thousands of mind-bending anecdotes filed to Erowid, a website that, since the early days of the internet, has built one of the world’s most influential records of drug use and its effects.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the scrappy, grassroots project, which hosts data on everything from caffeine to cannabis to paracetamol (also known as Tylenol) to heroin, like a Wikipedia on all things pharmaceutical. Users post information about purifying street drugs, rolling joints and the health implications of drug misuse. Visitors to the site can find information about drug toxicology and interactions between chemicals. They can even wade through the archives of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide – or LSD.

But perhaps most intriguing of all are the 45,000-plus trip reports in the “Experience Vault”. These hallucinatory tales, with titles such as “Tripping Alone on 1.5 Grams From Hell”, “The Weekend At The Edge Of The Universe” and “The Thumbprint”, where an unfortunate soul loses their mind on a drug related to LSD called AL-LAD, do not just make for idle internet fodder. They have become vital for academic research, especially for esoteric and illegal substances where clinical data does not exist or is challenging to obtain.

“People publishing their personal experiences and experimenting outside of the legal and academic bubble has led to the science, in many ways,” says David Luke, associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich in the UK who studies psychedelics and has conducted clinical trials using microdoses of LSD. “There was so little published academic research and so few resources for exploring the use of psychoactive drugs that Erowid was invaluable for research, and to understand issues around safety and experiences.” 

Today, the social stigma around some types of drug use has softened to the point that Ayahuasca ceremonies, mushrooms and ketamine have even become a fixture in some corners of the business world. While these substances are still illegal in many countries, a growing number of places are choosing to decriminalise drugs that were previously subject to extensive crack downs. In recent years, psychedelics have also gathered renewed interest from the scientific community as a potential approach for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Their use, however, remains controversial and in some places unregulated therapeutic use of these drugs has led to tragedy.

Back in 1995, when Erowid was founded, psychedelics were very much of the underground. This was a hostile time for drug reform, just over a decade since US president Ronald Reagan had expanded the war on drugs. 

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Florida Attorney Sues Roku Over Failure to Implement Age Verification, Privacy Concerns

Florida’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Roku, drawing attention to the growing privacy risks tied to smart devices that quietly track user behavior.

The case, brought by Attorney General James Uthmeier under the Florida Digital Bill of Rights, accuses the streaming company of collecting and selling the personal data of children without consent while refusing to take reasonable steps to determine which users are minors.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The lawsuit portrays Roku as a company that profits from extensive data collection inside homes, including data from children. According to the complaint, Roku “collected, sold and enabled reidentification of sensitive personal data, including viewing habits, voice recordings and other information from children, without authorization or meaningful notice to Florida families.”

It continues, “Roku knows that some of its users are children but has consciously decided not to implement industry-standard user profiles to identify which of its users are children.”

Another passage states, “Roku buries its head in the sand so that it can continue processing and selling children’s valuable personal and sensitive data.”

The growing push for digital ID–based age verification is being framed as a way to protect children online, but privacy advocates warn it would do the opposite.

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Canada’s AG Claims Anti-“Hate” Law Isn’t About Censorship

Governments around the world have a long history of introducing laws that restrict speech while insisting they are not acts of censorship.

Each new proposal is framed as a measure to promote safety, combat misinformation, or protect vulnerable communities, yet the result is often the same: expanded state authority over what citizens can say or share.

Now Canada’s Attorney General Sean Fraser is attempting to reassure Canadians that the federal government’s new hate speech legislation, Bill C-9, is not a disguised attempt to police online expression.

The proposal, already facing strong opposition from free expression advocates, introduces new “hate-related” offenses and expands police powers over what is labeled “hatred” in the Criminal Code.

Fraser told MPs that the government is not seeking to criminalize internet activity that is currently legal.

“We should recognize there are many acts we may find offensive that do not constitute hate for the purpose of the Criminal Code,” he said during his appearance before the Commons justice committee.

He insisted the bill’s purpose is not censorship, even as he confirmed that its provisions would apply equally to speech on the internet and in public spaces.

The legislation, officially titled An Act To Amend The Criminal Code (Combatting Hate Act), also bans the display of Nazi and Hamas symbols that are deemed to promote hatred, makes it an offense to obstruct religious or cultural ceremonies, and rewrites how “hatred” is defined.

The bill frames it as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike.”

Free speech advocates have warned that this rewording lowers the legal bar by abandoning the Supreme Court’s requirement that hatred must be “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature.”

Fraser responded that any online statement would only be subject to prosecution if it already met the threshold for hate propaganda under existing law. “The only circumstance where you could imagine some online comment attracting scrutiny under this law would attach to behavior that is criminal today but is punished less severely,” he told the committee.

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WE VOTED FOR THIS: BlueSky Leftists Lose Their Minds After Trump White House Invades Their Safe Space and Savagely Trolls Them with This EPIC Video

Team Trump set the internet on fire on Friday after invading the Left’s top social media safe space and sending them into hysterics by posting an amazing video.

As TGP readers know, over-the-hill leftists have decided to mark Saturday as a day of protests across America against President Trump, whom they see as a dictator. The protest, known as “No Kings Day,” is being funded by radical billionaires like George Soros.

The White House decided that on the eve of “No Kings Day,” they would join BlueSky and serve up a little reminder of everything the left is needlessly protesting.

“What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you,” the White House team wrote.

“Can’t wait to spend more quality time together! ❤️”

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I Searched For Stories Of Trans Contagion. Google Lectured Me With False Propaganda

There are a plethora of stories of children being pressured into adopting transgender personalities, but don’t bother using Google to search for them. I tried, and the search engine spat out unsolicited propaganda and falsehoods about children and transgender identity.

I searched for testimonies from young people who adopted transgender identities “because it was cool” — like the story of Ash Eskridge, a young woman who became convinced she was a boy after watching social media influencers promote transgenderism.

But Google’s AI tool brushes off the idea that transgender identities are often a social contagion, despite evidence to the contrary. A 2018 study from Brown University — which was quickly repressed after outrage from transgender ideologues — found that 87 percent of the children in question “became gender dysphoric after friends did, after increasing their time online, or both,” as my colleague Joy Pullmann reported at the time. The study included examples of friend groups all adopting transgender identities together, and of kids being rewarded for transgender identities with social incentives like popularity and praise. Another study, by researchers at Virginia Tech in 2023, found girls who adopted transgender identities were “more likely to be accepted by peers.”

The search engine would have you believe that children are not just capable of arbitrarily choosing their sex but of doing so before they graduate from diapers. “Gender identity typically solidifies between ages 3 and 4,” the AI overview claims. The hard scientific proof that your toddler’s biology is actually backwards, it says, can be a “girl playing with trucks or a boy preferring dolls.”

One of the sources collated by the AI summary is a Mayo Clinic article that instructs parents to reinforce and show “admiration” for children who show an interest in stereotypically cross-sex behaviors. You can even “help ease a child’s depression and anxiety” by socially transitioning them, say the Mayo Clinic staff. All of this so-called medical advice points to reinforcing a child’s gender confusion, never challenging it.

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UK Speech Regulator Ofcom Claims First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Americans From Its Censorship Law

If you’re going to cross an ocean to tell Americans what speech they can and can’t allow, the least you can do is not trip over your own jurisdictional nonsense on the way in.

Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, which has lately decided to try and become an international speech cop, managed to do exactly that.

But when the regulator began sending enforcement letters to small US platforms under its sweeping online censorship law, the Online Safety Act, it probably didn’t expect to trigger a constitutional ambush.

But that’s exactly what it got.

Preston Byrne, one of attorneys representing 4chan, Kiwi Farms, and two other American companies, said Ofcom had been sending “frankly asinine letters under English law.”

His clients, he explained, “are entirely American. All of their operations are American. All of their infrastructure is American, and they have no connection to the UK whatsoever.”

Despite this, Ofcom threatened the companies with “a £20,000 fine plus £100 daily penalties for 60 days thereafter.”

Byrne responded to Ofcom’s pressure by filing a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit was designed not only to challenge Ofcom’s jurisdiction but to force a contradiction into the open.

Byrne said the purpose of the lawsuit was threefold. One, to show the global censors that the resistance in the United States is now prepared to fight back, and they don’t have freedom of action.

Two, to assert hims client’s claims and defenses in a US court, and make the argument in front of a US federal judge.

And the third one was to provoke Ofcom into “doing something stupid, which is exactly what they did.”

After the case was filed, Ofcom sent what Byrne called “a 40-page letter of tremendous length, which is deeply unserious.”

Ofcom’s written response delivered exactly what Byrne says was needed: an explicit admission that Ofcom doesn’t “think US law applies on US soil and that they’re going to use [the argument of] sovereign immunity.”

This was more than a legal contradiction; it was a political one that directly undercuts the British government’s public assurances.

“This rather undermines the British government’s assertions that it’s made time and again, including to the President, to his face, that the British government is not using its sovereign power to censor American citizens,” Byrne said.

In its official notice to 4chan, Ofcom made an extraordinary admission which, in trying to assert its authority, effectively undercut its entire legal position.

The regulator wrote: “We also note 4chan’s claim that it is protected from enforcement action taken by Ofcom because of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. However, the First Amendment binds only the US government and not overseas bodies, such as Ofcom, and therefore, it does not affect Ofcom’s powers to enforce the Act in this case.”

This reveals the fundamental flaw in Ofcom’s claim to authority over American companies.

By asserting that the First Amendment “binds only the US government,” Ofcom admits it stands entirely outside the US constitutional order, yet it simultaneously claims the right to enforce UK speech law against US entities operating solely on US soil.

Ofcom cannot have it both ways: it cannot disclaim the reach of US law while insisting that British law somehow extends across the Atlantic.

If the First Amendment has no force on Ofcom’s actions in the United States, then neither does the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act, which has no legal effect beyond the UK.

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Instagram says it’s safeguarding teens by limiting them to PG-13 content

Meta says teenagers on Instagram will be restricted to seeing PG-13 content by default and won’t be able to change their settings without a parent’s permission

Instagram says it’s safeguarding teens by limiting them to PG-13 contentBy BARBARA ORTUTAYAP Technology WriterThe Associated Press

Teenagers on Instagram will be restricted to seeing PG-13 content by default and won’t be able to change their settings without a parent’s permission, Meta announced on Tuesday.

This means kids using teen-specific accounts will see photos and videos on Instagram that are similar to what they would see in a PG-13 movie — no sex, drugs or dangerous stunts, among others.

“This includes hiding or not recommending posts with strong language, certain risky stunts, and additional content that could encourage potentially harmful behaviors, such as posts showing marijuana paraphernalia,” Meta said in a blog post Tuesday, calling the update the most significant since it introduced teen accounts last year.

Anyone under 18 who signs up for Instagram is automatically placed into restrictive teen accounts unless a parent or guardian gives them permission to opt out. The teen accounts are private by default, have usage restrictions on them and already filter out more “sensitive” content — such as those promoting cosmetic procedures. But kids often lie about their ages when they sign up for social media, and while Meta has began using artificial intelligence to find such accounts, the company declined to say how many adult accounts it has determined to be minors since rolling out the feature earlier this year.

The company is also adding an even stricter setting that parents can set up for their children.

The changes come as the social media giant faces relentless criticism over harms to children. As it seeks to add safeguards for younger users, Meta has already promised it wouldn’t show inappropriate content to teens, such as posts about self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.

But this does not always work. A recent report, for instance, found that teen accounts researchers created were recommended age-inappropriate sexual content, including “graphic sexual descriptions, the use of cartoons to describe demeaning sexual acts, and brief displays of nudity.”

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Canada’s Privacy Watchdog Not Consulted on Bill C-8, Enabling Secret Internet & Phone Shutdowns

Legislation that would allow federal ministers to secretly order telecom providers to cut off a Canadian’s phone or internet access is advancing without any input from the country’s top privacy authority.

Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne told a Commons committee that his office was never asked to review Bill C-8 before it was introduced.

The bill would authorize the cabinet to compel telecom companies to block services to individuals considered a security threat, without needing a judge’s approval or any public disclosure.

“The issue never came up,” Dufresne said during testimony before the House of Commons ethics committee. He confirmed, “We are not consulted on specific pieces of legislation before they are tabled.”

Bill C-8 would allow the federal cabinet to direct a telecom provider to deny all services to a specific person, based solely on the government’s assessment of a threat. No warrant would be required. No independent body would be tasked with reviewing the decision.

Conservative MP Michael Barrett raised an alarm over what he described as a dangerous overreach. He said the bill would allow the government to quietly seize control of individuals’ communications, with no transparency and no legal checks.

“Without meaningful limits, bills like C-8 can hand the government secret powers over Canadians’ communications,” said Barrett. “It’s a serious setback for privacy and for democracy.”

He pressed Dufresne on whether Parliament should be required to conduct privacy assessments before passing legislation with such broad surveillance potential.

“Isn’t Parliament simply being asked to grant sweeping powers of surveillance to the government without a formal review?” Barrett asked.

Dufresne responded, “It’s not a legal obligation under the Privacy Act.”

While acknowledging the importance of national security, Dufresne warned that such measures must not override core privacy protections. “We need to make sure that by protecting national security, we are not doing so at the expense of privacy,” he said.

A previous version of the idea, Bill C-26, failed in an earlier Parliament after concerns over its civil liberties implications.

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